What Obama Can Learn from Homeland

It is a matter of public record that Homeland is your favorite show. I think that means I know something you're waiting on. I've seen the first two episodes of the second season, which premieres Sunday. Of course, if you really wanted to see the first two episodes of the new season, I'm sure someone could get them for you in about the time it takes for a drone to acquire a target, but I imagine it would just be a bit too embarrassing for you to ask. "Can you bring me those reports on the Iranian nuclear situation? How are we supposed to react to flat-lining job numbers? Also, can you call Showtime and get the new Homelands?" I can't quite see it. Homeland may be the only thing in the world about which I can say that I know something you want to know.

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I have good news and bad news. The good news is that the show is terrific. Better this season so far than last. So slick, so elegant, and in places so suspenseful that it's genuinely terrifying while also being moving. It has just that dimension of cool intellectual fascination that I imagine amuses your aloof and wintry mind. You're going to love it. The bad news is that it's an indictment of your entire foreign policy in relation to the Middle East.

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The question of Homeland is basically this: Are we crazy? Or rather, who is crazy? The twinned plots of Homeland are really about a pair of possible mental breakdowns. Carrie Mathison is either a driven CIA operative, who sees the frightening truth behind the return of an American hero from Afghanistan, or she's a woman whose bipolar paranoia has overwhelmed her. Nicholas Brody is either a man of great devotion to newly acquired principles who will wreck havoc on the United States, or an honest man who has been tortured and manipulated to the point where he is willing to commit mass crimes. Both main characters are, at key moments, dubious of themselves: Part of the problem with being crazy is that everybody else seems crazy, and everybody knows it, so how can you ever know for certain if you're sane?

This is precisely the situation we find ourselves in at the end of the "Arab Spring," a phrase that we must now start using in quotation marks. The contribution the newly elected president of Egypt made to the United Nations this week was typically revealing: He called for curtailment of freedom of speech in the West, for Muslim control of all lands conquered by Islam after the year 630, and for the continuation of 1.5 billion dollars of U.S. aid. Crazy. The riots over that disgusting, racist video qualified as insanity if anything does. What do the rioters think? That the United States can control every video uploaded to the Internet? Their response shows a misunderstanding not just of the nature of American power, but of the reality of power per se. More upsetting than the violence was the triviality of what they were rioting over. Thousands of Syrians are being killed, but you're killing an ambassador over some shitty, low-rent video? It is a sign of madness: obsessing over nothing.

But everybody already knows that the Middle East is crazy. Probably hopelessly crazy. The fact that you, President Obama, have not meaningfully tried to address the Israel-Palestine situation cannot be held against you. When Mitt Romney said that there was no solution in sight, he was foolish only in expressing the position, not for holding it. Presidents are not supposed to despair. But who can argue that despair is not a perfectly rational response to existing conditions?

The problem with your policies is that they make us wonder: Are we crazy? In the 2008 election, you defined insanity as "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." I fail to see how the American war in Afghanistan can now be defined in any other way. If you haven't read Tom Junod's piece on the costs of the drone wars, stop reading me and go read it now. Four years after you promised to close it, Guantanamo remains open. It was one thing when Bush was committing these evils in the aftermath of 9/11. He was hotheaded and an idiot. You are neither. And so you have made secret imprisonment, the violation of national sovereignty, and the general disregard for international law an American norm. You have normalized the insanity.

Homeland is the cultural expression of the fear of that insanity. So while I do hope you enjoy Homeland's madness, and I'm sure you will, I hope you also recognize: You helped make the madness.